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Today's Opinions

Last week I had a simple request. Three guys from California want to come to Cedar Key to catch a tarpon. They had plenty of experience with blue water fish and had already caught sailfish, marlin, tuna and swordfish, but tarpon was still on their "to do" list. The timing was perfect as the full moon was on its way and the tides were stronger than normal.

I sat there quietly, deep in my thoughts. Alone in my thoughts. Alone in the midst of a crowd, all seated, all in their own thoughts. Time disappeared, seemed not to matter, not to exist. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound..." Forming a background, then gaining in intensity. The crowd united in chorus, me still deep in my thoughts. That song usually ended these gatherings, this time, beginning. "When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise..."

As everyone knows real-estate has been reeling with problems lately. Property values have dropped significantly, making foreclosures for many homeowners immanent. Home foreclosures in fact are at an all time high.

Well, there is more to impending foreclosures than meets-the-eye. Devalued property values are not the only problem. Rapidly rising fuel costs and layoffs have added to and made the situation even worse. For those who made variable interest rate mortgages, that doesn't help, either.

Remember back in the late 80s and the early 90s when buying a computer got you almost as much weight in paper (manuals) as in the hardware? If you have purchased a computer recently you might have noticed the absence of all that paper. And what about those "recovery" CDs? You never see them any more either!

As early as 1997, when you bought a computer you got a reasonable amount of manuals, enough information to get you started with most of your programs. But the "recovery" CDs were missing. As I recall, HP/Compaq were right at the forefront of this change.

"Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink." (Matthew 27:48 NIV)

You never know when you may be reminded of some great and inspirational truth contained in the Word of God about our precious Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Just the other day, while Galina and I were making a house call here in town, we ran into a person who told about their unique occupation of working on a sponge boat.

I watched with interest the truck drivers in England who protested the high price of diesel fuel in front of Parliament last week. They were complaining about the eight dollars a gallon they were paying to keep their trucks running. And we thought diesel fuel was high in this country.

European gasoline is nearly as expensive, too, making their gas prices more than double what we are paying.

Interesting that the Euro-dollar is worth more than the American dollar, which means they are paying nearly three times what we are paying for fuel, and we're complaining?

Now that I've covered trip planning through road service providers, Internet trip planning services and software, there is another solution to your trip-planning dilemma.

Some of the GPS manufacturers, Garmin among them, ship certain models of their units with software that allows the user to plan the trip on the computer and upload to route to the GPS for later use. Some of these GPS receivers can store 50 or more routes with 500 waypoints!